What is white hat SEO and black hat SEO…
So your probably very familiar with the term search engine optimisation (aka SEO), but you may have also heard the terms white hat SEO and black hat SEO.
So what are these?
White hat SEO are best practice SEO techniques which are recommended by the search engines, here are 5 examples:
- Write content aimed at the user
- Write descriptive META elements
- Added descriptive ALT elements to images
- Make the website easy to navigate
- Have a good URL structure
Black hat SEO are techniques which are not recommended by the search engines and are used to game the system, this could then lead to a penalty and your website being blacklisted, here are 5 examples of blackhat SEO:
- Cloaking web pages
- Hiding text / links via colour and CSS techniques
- Purchasing backlinks
- Stuffing keywords on to a page
- Using doorway pages
If you are unsure the techniques you are using are whitehat or blackhat, drop your comments below.
Image from SXC.hu
About the author: Dave Cain is an SEO with 10 years digital marketing experience. He can be followed on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ or you can subscribe to his RSS feed.